Douwe Osinga's Blog: Life imitating art, eh Dilbert

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

So we're back in Europe. And even though we booked a flight on Swiss, we were actually transported on American Airlines. Oh boy. You can really notice that this airline is practically broke. The plane was rather dirty, i.e. trays contained old coffee stains, little fuzzles in the toilets, old stuff in the seat pockets, nothing to worry about to much, but as my wife remarked, if they don't clean the inside of the plane, maybe they didn't have a look at the state of the engines either.


Then the food, which was in nothing like good restaurant food, except for that it came in rather small portions. And they charge for beer, of course, 5 dollars. Some may counter, what is 5 dollars on an airticket and I'd say, excactly. Why annoy your customers for a few dollars.


As usual they played the security video and that was quite amazing. You know where they always show how to put on the life jacket? They didn't do that. Instead they showed how to hold on the cushion of your seat to avoid drowning after a crash. Now I realize it might have never happened so far that the life jackets were any good in case of an emergency and therefore getting rid of them might have seemed like an obvious way of cutting costs, but I could have sworn I had seen exactly this on Dilbert. Dogbert shows the management how to save money on safety and on the last frame you see all these scared people crashing down, while holding on to their seat cushions.


I guess I wasn't the only one that was surprised. Soon after the showing of the video the pilot begged for forgiveness but we were going to be late, because somebody had decided he wanted to get off the airplane and now we had to unload the persons luggage too.

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